An inbound link is one from someone else’s website to some content on your website.

This is good because if that someone has a a popular website, then prospective customers may follow the link.

From Google’s perspective, the number of these inbound links to your site and the authority (or trustworthiness) of the sites which link back to your site are a good indicator of how trustworthy your site is and therefore how high up Google’s results pages your website should rank.

An outbound link is one which points from one (or more) of your web pages to a piece of content that is on a different website.

These outbound links are used so that people can easily find their way to important nuggets of information on other parts of the internet.

Because we typically only link to sites we can trust, when we link to another website we are effectively telling Google to trust that site too.

When people are talking about links (if you don’t know what a link is you can find out by clicking here) they often talk about something called anchor text.

Anchor text is the bit of text that you click to follow the link. Because the text effectively ‘holds’ the link in place on a page, it is described as anchor text.

Anchor text often gives you information about the page you will land on when it’s clicked, for example – Noisy Little Monkey’s Google Plus Page is a link to our Google+ page. Neat, huh? Click here takes you to the same page, but the anchor text isn’t descriptive of the landing page.

Since descriptive anchor text is the most useful for people, it seems that Google tries to use it to understand what a page is about. To see how important the words you use as anchor text are, type click here into a Google search. The site that has the most links that use the anchor text “click here” is number one in the results, which right now is the page for Adobe Reader.

The term “reciprocal link” describes the practice of exchanging links between two or more websites. A ‘you link to me, I’ll link to you’ type situation.

This practice is often employed in the misguided belief that Google will rank both sites higher. At best, this is simply a waste of time. At worst, Google may penalise your site because you are employing spammy techniques.

Reciprocal links should only be employed when there is a genuine relationship between the two sites, for example  – we link to Bison Grid all the time, because they make awesome online applications and they link to us because we’re ace at online marketing. Our business services complement each other, so each business recommends their customers to use the other.

Online, this relationship is underpinned by the fact we talk to each other on Twitter, we both like each other’s Facebook pages,  we run seminars together… Google is able to see all this activity which demonstrates our ‘real world’ relationship and Google can also see that we’re not linking our sites to get more ‘Google juice’.

An internal link is a link from one part of your website to another part of your website.

The main menu on your website is probably a good place to find internal links to other pages on your website because typically, all the links in your main menu will point to internal pages.

These internal links are used so that people can easily find their way to important nuggets of information buried deep in your site.

Google also looks at these internal links to try to understand which parts of your website you believe to be most important. So, try not to have a link to your Terms & Conditions in the footer of every page on your website as this might lead Google to believe it’s the most important page on your site because you’re always linking to it!

A “linking domain” is the main address (often where the homepage lives) of a website that has a page (or more) which links to your website.

For example, our friends at TXM Recruit link to us from this page: http://www.txmrecruit.co.uk/about/partners.aspx

Therefore the linking domain is www.txmrecruit.co.uk because that is the domain that holds the page links to our website.

If there were hundreds of pages on www.txmrecruit.co.uk which all linked to www.noisylittlemonkey.com it would give us hundreds of inbound links, but only from one a linking domain.

Diversity of linking domains

It makes sense to have links from a wide variety of domains to demonstrate to Google that your website is trusted by a number of different organisations.

Neighbourhood of linking domains

If you’re considering using a “Search Engine Optimisation” (SEO) company to build links for you it’s worth remembering that the best way to get quality links from trusted websites is by having unique, fresh, well researched content. If your website is only talking about your products and services, then an SEO company is only going to be able to build links from sites that will link out without checking the quality of the web page they are linking to. These sites often link to anyone and everyone who asks, for a fee. They’re often called link farms.

We’d recommend you avoid link farms and any SEO company that recommend you use them, because:

• The value of the link that points to your site are greatly reduced because link farms contain so many outbound links.
• Link farms often also link to adult websites, websites that include profane, juvenile or gross content or poorly maintained websites that may have security vulnerabilities which makes them a danger to browsers
• It’s reasonable to think that probably, Google can see all these links pointing at you and if lots of them are in a dodgy neighbourhood, then maybe your website isn’t one that should be trusted either.

You don’t need an SEO company.

As we say, produce unique, interesting, helpful content for your customers. Then people will link to it without needing an SEO company. Simple!

A beginner’s guide to web links

We’ve been asked a question on our Facebook page about links and why they may or may not be important to a website’s position in Google’s results (AKA “SERPs”), so we’ve put together a number of definitions that will help you understand links – particularly if you’re just starting out on the journey of marketing your business online.

We’ll start with the basics:

What is a link?

A link is a part (or parts) of a web page that you click to go somewhere else. “Somewhere else” may be another part of that web page, another page on that same website, or another website entirely.

If links are contained in a portion of text they are often underlined in blue: like this.

But links can be contained in images, video and all manner of things.

Basically, anything you can click on a website which takes you to another place is a link.

Here are some useful links for your next steps…

What is anchor text?
What is an internal link?
What is an outbound link?
What is an inbound link?
What is a reciprocal link?
What is a linking domain?